Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Heartland Announces Cast for Joel Drake Johnson's THE END OF THE TOUR

Heartland Theatre Company and director Sandi Zieliniski have announced their cast for the upcoming production of Joel Drake Johnson’s THE END OF THE TOUR, a sharply funny play about a very dysfunctional family in Dixon, Illinois.

Cristen Susong, last seen as the peppy and polished Rona Lisa Peretti in ISU’s 25th ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE, will play Jan, the daughter who is at the end of her rope with her narcissistic mother. Nancy A. Nickerson will play that mother, May, whose greatest memory is not raising either of her children, but singing once for Dixon’s native son Ronald Reagan, even though it’s never clear if that actually happened. Nickerson just finished up a stint as the whistle-blowing stockholder in THE SOLID GOLD CADILLAC at Community Players; she was last seen at Heartland in Phil Olson’s A NICE FAMILY GATHERING, playing a much nicer Mom than the one in THE END OF THE TOUR.

Jake Olbert, who played the Duke in ISU’s production of MEASURE FOR MEASURE last fall and was so good as the fantasy brother in Heartland’s version of Alan Ayckbourn’s WOMAN IN MIND just before that, will play the third member of the Morris clan, estranged son Andrew.

Clark Abraham, John D. Poling, and Heartland Theatre Company board members George Freeman, Ann White and Gayle Hess round out the cast.